Tag: DIY

For Mac users who cannot get their Mac to boot, this is a quick guide to find out the level of the problem with your internal hard drive. If on start up you get to the Apple logo and beyond, then this means that your Mac can read the internal hard drive. For this to happen the drive will have carried out it’s own start up process when you pressed your mac power on button. This therefore tells you that your drive is functional to a point, but has some reading problems.

If however on start up your Mac shows a folder with a question mark, then this means that your Mac cannot read the drive at all. Therefore your drive may have a more serious problem.

It’s something we should all be doing but never seems important until it’s too late. I’m not talking about taking the dog for a walk or feeding the cat, I’m talking about backing up your PC. In the words of Joni Mitchell “You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.” How would you feel if you never saw your data again. Family photos, years worth of e-mails, documents, music and videos all gone in the blink of an eye. This is usually where we come in with our data recovery process. But there is an alternative. Lifehacker has an excellent guide on using free software to backup your PC. The only prerequisite is that you purchase an external hard disk of sufficient storage capacity.

For Mac users there is a totally different process. If you are running Leopard (10.5) then take a look at Time Machine. (More on this in a future post)

Dataquest has already started to see the influence the current state of the economy is having on the data recovery industry. We need to make sure that established and future customers are made aware of the options they have available to them when seeking out professional help for data loss. We are already aware that more DIY customers are attempting to recover their lost data themselves. This is where we need to work together with these customers to inform and educate them. This can a simple guideline on backup and basic data recovery.

Important Links

Advice

Stop using the hard drive as soon as possible. If the problem is getting worse then you may eventually lose access completely.

Don't download ANYTHING to the disk. It could write over the files you're trying to recover.

Don't try to scan, repair or fix any errors unless you have backups of the data. A failed repair process can damage the files beyond recovery.

Don't re-install or restore the computer unless you have backups of the data already. It may get the machine running again, but only in a factory-fresh way. Your data will be lost.

If you manage to access your files at any point, make a copy to another drive as soon as you can. It may be a fluke, and could be the last time you see the files. Don't reboot expecting to see them again.

If the files you need are really important then you should consider getting the disk professionally recovered. We've spent years making our process as safe as possible to maximise our chances of success.

If you decide to try your own recovery, keep a close watch on the time estimates. If the time keeps incrementing up it could be a sign of disk trouble. Failure to deal with that could cause the drive to fail completely, and beyond repair. A hard drive shouldn't take longer than a few hours to extract.